the arc.fm

Cole brings us one of the great living short story writers, and we argue whether her stories are stories at all, until Jaclynn gets the last word.

Cole makes the case for Lydia Davis, the MacArthur Fellow and Man Booker International Prize winner whose stories can run a single line. Robby read one and found it charming. Jaclynn has a Rothko theory for why she hasn't gotten Davis yet. We read a story aloud, hear Davis in interviews and readings, and fight about what the word "story" even means. You don't need to know her work first, and by the end Jaclynn has her answer.

New episodes of The Arc arrive roughly once a month, but they are ephemeral beings that sometimes take longer. You're encouraged to start from the beginning with Episode 01: The Princess Bride.

RSS

Cole has spent fifteen years assuming everyone knows Lydia Davis, so the episode opens with a test: had Robby or Jaclynn heard of her before he started talking about her? For Jaclynn, the answer is only through Cole, who gave her a book of Davis's stories as a Christmas present and brings her up whenever the baby shoes story or Fleabag comes up. Cole walks us through why his assumption made sense. Davis received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003 and the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, and she is admired by writers, translators and readers around the world. He also admits that every time he mentions her, he learns how few people have actually read her.

From there, the conversation turns into how to approach art you don't get yet. Jaclynn offers her Rothko theory: she looked at a Rothko, thought she could paint a red square, then sat with it until she saw the complexity. Bonsai trees went the same way, from cute trees she grew up seeing at Kmart to something meditative once a man in Japan walked her through his collection without a shared language. Robby read the story Cole chose and found it charming, though he was more interested in why he was reading it than in the reading itself. Cole explains why he loves her: a story that holds a single moment, with just enough detail that every reader pictures a different hotel lounge. Along the way we hear Davis herself in interviews, including one with Tyler Cowen and one at a literary festival in Scandinavia, and reading two of her pieces aloud.

The argument underneath all of it is whether these pieces count as stories. Cole finds the story in the narrator's realization. Someone brings back the plot versus story distinction from our Women Talking episode. Someone compares a Davis piece to bubble gum, a burst of flavor and then it's over. Jaclynn has barely read Davis but is in no way against her, and she keeps asking the question out loud. Stay for the last few minutes: she gets the last word, and it's the line that shows she gets it.

00:27 - IS LYDIA DAVIS FAMOUS? DID JACLYNN LIE?

Cole asks whether Robby and Jaclynn had heard of Lydia Davis before this episode. He explains why he assumed she was a household name in the literary world, citing her MacArthur Fellowship and her Man Booker International Prize, and Jaclynn admits the book he gave her is still unread.

07:00 - JACLYNN'S BRILLIANT ROTHKO THEORY

Jaclynn explains why she thinks Davis is like Rothko: it looks simple until you spend time with it. She believes in Davis and says she just doesn't get her yet.

08:42 - LYDIA DAVIS INTERVIEW WITH TYLER COWEN

A clip of Davis in conversation with Tyler Cowen, who introduces her as a short story writer, essayist and translator of Proust and Flaubert. She explains why she chose not to read secondary material before translating Proust.

09:50 - ROBBY READS THE STORY

Robby reads "Conversation in Hotel Lounge," a very short piece about two women overheard on a sofa.

10:57 - JACLYNN LEARNS ABOUT BONSAI TREES.. IN JAPAN

Jaclynn gives a second example of something she didn't understand at first: bonsai trees. She tells the story of living in Japan and being walked through a stranger's bonsai collection, with no shared language, and how that changed her mind.

13:44 - LYDIA DAVIS, INTERVIEW TWO

A short clip of Davis describing her novel, The End of the Story, which was built from fragments to mimic how a narrator remembers.

14:18 - REINDEER ANTLERS AS ART

We talk about how friends in art school changed one host's mind about contemporary art: anyone could make it, but the work is that they did, and that they can explain why.

16:25 - ROBBY NEW YORKER RESPONSER

Robby gives his honest read. He didn't hate it, found it charming, and thought it sounded like an anecdote from The New Yorker. We talk about how much work the reader does when a story gives you this little, and Cole explains the context he brought, including how Fleabag and the baby shoes story got him thinking about efficient writing.

22:28 - JACLYNN READS THE STORY

Jaclynn reads "Conversation in Hotel Lounge" again, and the room finds new things in it. Cole loves that every reading can place the lounge, the sofa and the women differently, and calls the piece a great outline: enough detail to picture it, enough room to imagine the rest.

26:51 - LYDIA DAVIS READS HER OWN WORK, "TWO SISTERS"

We hear Davis read "Two Sisters," a longer piece, in her own voice. Then we talk about why a strong reaction, even dislike, is a gift to an artist.

31:22 - PRETENTIOUS ALERT - SHIBBOLETH

Cole's theory is that knowing Davis works like a password, a shibboleth, among art students and literature readers. We explain the word, test it against Google Maps versus Apple Maps, and Cole lists the college towns where he has found fellow Davis readers. We also hear "Safe Love," a piece only a few lines long, and Cole says her stories are the shortest versions of salty dog tales.

39:45 - LYDIA DAVIS INTERVIEW IN SCANDANAVIA

Davis describes her own work for a festival audience, from a novel with no chapters to stories that are a line or two long. She says she calls them all stories to make it easier.

42:21 - WHERE LYDIA DAVIS GETS HER IDEAS FROM

Davis says that if you wait for a good idea, you just keep doubting yourself, and that forcing it can bring up very strange and interesting material.

44:17 - LYDIA DAVIS INTERVIEW ON IF HER STORIES ARE DOCUMENTARIES

Was the hotel lounge conversation real? We disagree about whether the piece is documentary or invented, then hear Davis explain that once she decides to write about a moment, she distances it from herself and shapes it until it is finished and no longer personal.

46:56 - WHAT IS ACTUALLY STORY?

The big question. We bring back plot versus story from our Women Talking episode, try bubble gum and Three's Company as analogies, and argue about whether a small change in the narrator's understanding is enough. Jaclynn gets the final word on the title.

00:27.792 IS LYDIA DAVIS FAMOUS? DID JACLYNN LIE?

07:00.667 JACLYNN'S BRILLIANT ROTHKO THEORY

08:42.292 LYDIA DAVIS INTERVIEW WITH TYLER COWEN

09:50.417 ROBBY READS THE STORY

10:57.709 JACLYNN LEARNS ABOUT BONSAI TREES.. IN JAPAN

13:44.834 LYDIA DAVIS, INTERVIEW TWO

14:18.334 REINDEER ANTLERS AS ART

16:25.751 ROBBY NEW YORKER RESPONSER

22:28.542 JACLYNN READS THE STORY

26:51.792 LYDIA DAVIS READS HER OWN WORK, "TWO SISTERS"

31:22.375 PRETENTIOUS ALERT - SHIBBOLETH

39:45.792 LYDIA DAVIS INTERVIEW IN SCANDANAVIA

42:21.584 WHERE LYDIA DAVIS GETS HER IDEAS FROM

44:17.709 LYDIA DAVIS INTERVIEW ON IF HER STORIES ARE DOCUMENTARIES

46:56.167 WHAT IS ACTUALLY STORY?

• Lydia Davis, Author and Translator

As a translator, Davis is known for new English versions of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way (2003) and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (2010). She has also translated Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, Michel Butor and Pierre Jean Jouve.

MacArthur Foundation

MacArthur Fellowship (2003): WIN

Man Booker International

Man Booker International Prize (2013): WIN

PEN America

PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story (2020): WIN

PEN/Hemingway Award, for Break It Down (1986): FINALIST

Other prizes and fellowships

Lannan Literary Award for Fiction (1998): WIN

Whiting Award for Fiction (1988): WIN

American Academy of Arts and Letters, Award of Merit Medal (2013): WIN

Guggenheim Fellowship: WIN

National Book Foundation

National Book Award for Fiction, for Varieties of Disturbance (2007): FINALIST

National Book Critics Circle

Essays One (2019): FINALIST

Honors

Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France (1999)

Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005)

The pieces and books we talk about in this episode: "Conversation in Hotel Lounge" (read aloud twice), "Two Sisters" (read by Davis), "Safe Love," her novel The End of the Story (1995), and her essay collection Essays Two (2021). For a wide starting point, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2009) gathers her short fiction through 2008, and Can't and Won't (2014) is a later collection.

• Davis grew up around writers. Her father, Robert Gorham Davis, was a critic and English professor, and her mother, Hope Hale Davis, was a short story writer and memoirist.
• Her first love was music. She studied piano and then violin before she became a writer.
• She spent second grade at a convent school in Graz, Austria.
• After Barnard College she lived in Ireland and France for nearly three years and worked as a translator for the film industry and art galleries before turning to literary translation.
• She has credited the prose poet Russell Edson's very short tales with freeing her to write however she wanted.
• In the Tyler Cowen clip in this episode, Davis says she chose not to read secondary material on Proust before translating him. The full interview also covers how to persuade an ant to leave your house.
• The New York Times named The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis one of the 100 best books of the 21st century.

We went in bracing for a horror movie and got an art house director's monster epic, one we place in the DMZ in the 1990s, and we spend the episode working out how far our expectations were from what Na Hong-jin made.

Hope (2026) is Na Hong-jin's first film since The Wailing in 2016, starring Hwang Jung-min, Alicia Vikander, and Michael Fassbender. On The Arc (thearc.fm), we talk about going in expecting a horror movie and finding a long, mostly-chase monster film that adds new movies near the end. Jaclynn calls it three movies stitched together, Robby disavows the horror label, and we land on the idea that our expectations were off, because Na Hong-jin comes from art house films.

Streaming availability starts Tuesday 10/13!

New episodes of The Arc arrive roughly once a month, but they are ephemeral beings that sometimes take longer. You're encouraged to start from the beginning with Episode 01: The Princess Bride.

RSS

Hope is Na Hong-jin's first film since The Wailing in 2016: a 156-minute South Korean film that premiered in competition at Cannes in May 2026 and opened in the US that September. It's reportedly the most expensive Korean film ever made, shot by Hong Kyung-pyo. A village police chief and his rookie deputy defend their town from a mysterious creature, and the creatures turn out to be aliens. From the director of The Chaser and The Yellow Sea, that premise caught us off guard. We showed up expecting horror, and Robby spends a good part of the episode disavowing that label, at one point in a full Southern accent, which detours us into British and Southern accents and some fun at Cole's scones.

Most of our conversation is the three of us working out what the plot was. Jaclynn's take is the sharpest: it's long, mostly a chase, and introduces two new movies near the end, so it feels like three movies stitched together. Her metaphor for the film is a highlight, so we'll let you find it: it involves a three-year-old half-sibling, a crayon, and an art thesis you have to present as if the monsters were always the plan. From there we debate whether a mystery counts as a plot, whether the alien chasing the child is its mother or a servant, why the sun seems to sit at noon, and whether a cat a driver swerves to avoid was real. One of us felt for the alien during a shot of it in obvious pain. Jaclynn also tells us about living in Asia and visiting the DMZ.

We also hear from Na Hong-jin, in translated Q&As (recorded in Los Angeles and Seoul). In the first, he describes a film that grew and grew, and talks about how Korea's small surface area shaped where this story could be set. A second clip, in the chapter "on the real story," comes later in the episode.

The turn comes when we talk about who made it. Knowing Na Hong-jin's art house background made us reconsider what we'd watched, and it leads to a question we keep circling: what's the contract with a movie like this? In the end, we expected a horror movie and got an art house director's monster epic. You don't need to have seen Hope to follow along. Dad will explain linear.

00:34 - THE MANY (OR FEW?) PLOT(S) OF "HOPE"

Robby is asked to say what he thinks the plot of Hope is without bending to the will of Jaclynn, who sees three movies stitched together around one long chase. We go back and forth on whether a mystery without a clear hero's-journey structure still counts as a plot.

08:36 - THE PLOT OF HOPE (FROM THE ALIENS' PERSPECTIVE)

We try to untangle the alien backstory, including whether the alien chasing the child is its mother or a servant, and we don't fully agree. We compare the way the story spirals outward to a Sam Spade movie.

10:20 - WHEN WERE EACH OF US IN OR OUT

We each name the moment we felt pulled into or pushed out of the film. One of us nearly walked out when the third movie began, and we talk about whether viewers should be warned that the film keeps restarting with new movies.

11:13 - WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW GOING TO "HOPE (2026)"

Some context before you go in: this is Na Hong-jin's first film in about ten years, it's reportedly the most expensive Korean film ever made, and we wonder whether he set out to make a blockbuster. We also marvel that the production built its sets on top of a real town.

16:02 - THE #1 THING WE WANT TO SAY ABOUT "HOPE (2026)"

We each give a short take on Hope, including a comparison to a jigsaw puzzle you assemble before noticing pieces are missing. Then we talk through how we'd critique it if a student had turned it in, and agree we'd put it more gently to a real student.

18:01 - JACLYNN'S AMAZING ANALOGY FOR "HOPE (2026)"

Jaclynn explains her mixed feelings with an extended analogy: a three-year-old half-sibling draws crayon monsters all over your art thesis, and you present it as if they were intentional. We then discuss what the contract is with a movie like this, and what viewers are owed.

22:53 - ON "FOCUS" IN STORYTELLING (EXPLAINED BY THE QUESTION 'HOW DO YOU EAT A SALAD?')

A conversation about focus in storytelling, explained through the question of how you eat a salad, and about how a story earns the audience's acceptance of its characters and plot. That leads into what we would ask the director.

37:23 - THE OVERALL FEELING OF "HOPE (2026)"

We poke fun at the chase's internal logic, from the time of day jumping around to the gas tank that never runs out, and we debate whether the cat a driver swerves to avoid was real and what that says about which lives are worth saving.

0:00 - COLD OPEN AND VERY SHORT TRAILER BECAUSE "HOPE" IS A KOREAN LANGUAGE ACTION FILM

0:34 - THE MANY (OR FEW?) PLOT(S) OF "HOPE"

3:21 - JACLYNN ON LIVING IN ASIA & VISITING THE DMZ BETWEEN North Korea and South Korea

4:58 - SET DESIGN

5:59 - SKETCH - CEO INTRODUCES THE DIRECTOR

7:22 - THE DIRECTOR SPEAKS

8:36 - THE PLOT OF HOPE (FROM THE ALIENS' PERSPECTIVE)

10:20 - WHEN WERE EACH OF US IN OR OUT

11:13 - WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW GOING TO "HOPE (2026)"

12:12 - STORIES OF WALKING INTO FILM SETS ACCIDENTALLY

16:02 - THE #1 THING WE WANT TO SAY ABOUT "HOPE (2026)"

18:01 - JACLYNN'S AMAZING ANALOGY FOR "HOPE (2026)"

21:47 - THE DIRECTOR OF "HOPE (2026)" ON THE REAL STORY

22:53 - ON "FOCUS" IN STORYTELLING (EXPLAINED BY THE QUESTION 'HOW DO YOU EAT A SALAD?')

23:59 - WHAT WOULD WE SAY TO THE DIRECTOR OF "HOPE (2026)" IN AN INTERVIEW?

26:37 - MAKING FUN OF COLE'S SCONES

27:38 - WHEN DID EACH OF US CRY DURING "HOPE (2026)"

30:14 - THINGS JACLYNN LOVES IN VISUALS

34:14 - BEHIND THE SCENES THOUGHTS (ESPECIALLY THE CAR)

37:23 - THE OVERALL FEELING OF "HOPE (2026)"

If you want to keep going on this one, a couple of other stops are worth your time. The InSession Film Podcast devoted an episode to Hope, a good companion listen if you want more voices on the film: InSession Film Podcast: Review - Hope.

The Certified Forgotten podcast also dedicated an episode to the film, for another take on it: Certified Forgotten: 'Hope' Gets Uncertified.

Or consider starting from the beginning: Episode 01: The Princess Bride is where we became friends.

Sound design via Freesound.org and Envato.

• S: Medium Crowd Clapping 5 by jentlemen | License: Creative Commons 0
• S: Light, slow uncomfortable clapping by TurboFool | License: Creative Commons 0
• S: Room Tone: McFarlin Auditorium by lakewoodsound | License: Creative Commons 0
• S: CRWDApls_Unenthusiastic Clapping_ShaneVincent_GSC24_BIN-AmbeoVR.wav by ShangusBurger | License: Creative Commons 0
• S: laugh_and_applause_2.wav by ondrosik | License: Creative Commons 0

• S: konfa.wav by monosfera | License: Creative Commons 0
• S: Generic Interior Walla by brunoboselli | License: Creative Commons 0
• S: applause-30-people-auditorium.wav by michaelbesaw | License: Creative Commons 0
• S: PA microphone feedback (2).wav by FreqMan | License: Attribution 4.0

• S: Forest, river, and birds by bagustris | License: Creative Commons 0

We argue that Field of Dreams isn't really about baseball or fathers so much as the elaborate lengths men will go to instead of just going to therapy, and it all starts with Robby who has cried through it on his birthday every year for more than thirty years.

We believe Field of Dreams isn't really about baseball, or farming, or even fathers and sons in the way you'd expect. It's about what men will do to avoid going to therapy. Robby has watched it on or near his birthday for more than thirty years and still cries every time. Jaclynn only saw it as a baby, so it's effectively new to her, and she didn't even know the famous line right. Our guests are Joe Connor (Mr. Sports Travel) and Patrick Fleming, and this one gets more emotional than a group of people talking about a cornfield has any right to. Patrick's late father, Mike Fleming, was a Triple-A umpire everyone expected to make the majors until he went home to Iowa at 23 to run the family printing company. That is Archie "Moonlight" Graham's story all over again: two men at the edge of the big leagues who gave it up for someone else.

Streaming availability as of 2026-09-18.

• Netflix (streaming with subscription)
• Prime Video (rent or buy)
• Apple TV (rent or buy)
• Fandango At Home (rent or buy)

New episodes of The Arc arrive roughly once a week, but they are ephemeral beings that sometimes take longer; you're encouraged to start from the beginning with Episode 01: The Princess Bride.

RSS

Field of Dreams is the 1989 movie where Kevin Costner hears a voice in his Iowa cornfield, plows under his crop to build a baseball diamond, and watches the ghosts of banned White Sox players walk out to play, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, and eventually his own late father, young again and asking for a catch. It is, on paper, a movie about baseball. It is also a movie about farming, and about kidnapping a reclusive author, and about a small-town doctor who gave up his one shot at the majors. None of that is what it's actually about, which is the thing Robby has known since he was 20 or 21 and cried, unexpectedly, the first time he saw it with a college friend who shared his birthday. He's watched it on or near his birthday almost every year since, more than thirty of them now, and he brought it here, which makes this his birthday movie and, fairly, makes him the star of it.

What we found is that Field of Dreams makes men cry, and it makes them cry at their keyboards: when we went looking for baseball experts to explain why the game matters, we got back dozens of very macho men writing in, choked up, needing to talk about this film. Two of them are here. Joe Connor has seen live sports in 176 countries and finished all 30 major-league parks the year his father died, in his memory. And Patrick Fleming, an Iowan and an indie musician, wrote Cole an email, read aloud in full, about his father Mike, a Triple-A umpire whose school booklet said "Mike will go all the way." Mike didn't. His own father died, and at 23 he went home to run the family printing company while every one of his umpire-school friends made the majors. Archie "Moonlight" Graham, in the movie, is that exact story: one at-bat away, then a small-town doctor for the rest of his life. Mike Fleming and Moonlight Graham lived the same life, and now the Little League fields Patrick grew up on are named Mike Fleming Field, his family's little field of dreams.

One of the hosts argues that the movie melts people because it lets a man have closure with a dead parent, and that closure only exists in fiction, which is what fiction is for. Another host pushes back that you don't even need the closure; you just need to watch someone you loved live out their happiest moment and get to stand in it with them. Somewhere in there we argue, at genuine length and without resolution, over whether James Earl Jones's character walks into the corn to die or to become a ghost or just to go look around and come back and write about it; one of us is very sure he's fine. We also take a hard look at what the movie asks of Costner's wife, at how much a very handsome man gets away with, at whether following your dream at all costs is exactly how we got where we are, and at the fact that the cars flooding in at the end were real Iowans answering a call on the radio, flicking their brights on and off so it would look like more of them. You do not have to have seen the film to follow any of it. But by about five minutes in, you'll want to have a catch.

01:23 - WHO BROUGHT "FIELD OF DREAMS" AND WHY?

Robby brought this one, because it's his birthday movie. He has watched it on or near his birthday almost every year since he was 20 or 21. It started in college, watching with a friend named Mark, when Robby cried without warning at the "want to have a catch" moment. He was shocked by his own reaction. So he watched it again the next year, and the year after that.

07:55 - PATRICK'S EMAIL ABOUT HIS FATHER

Patrick Fleming reads us the email he sent Cole before the taping. His father, Mike, was a professional umpire everyone thought would go all the way to the majors. Then Mike's own father died suddenly, and at 23 he went home to Iowa to run the family printing company. Patrick draws the line straight to Moonlight Graham: two men at the edge of the big leagues who gave it up for someone else. Today, the Little League fields Patrick grew up on carry his dad's name.

20:57 - ROBBY READ LITERALLY ALL OF HIS NOTES ON FIELD OF DREAMS

Robby has seen this movie more than 40 times, and he brought notes. We let him read them, scene by scene: the three times Ray hears the voice, Ray's fear of turning into his own father, the PTA meeting over the Terence Mann book. It's not a review. It's a man showing us how much he loves a movie.

23:50 - ROBBY CRIES

And then Robby cries, right in the middle of the moment Ray's father shows up and the catch begins. We talk about what got to him, and about realizing your parents are their own people, which brings us right back to Patrick's dad.

28:41 - SONS MATCHING FATHERS

Patrick tells us his father never got a traditional retirement, because he worked until he died. But he got a version of the dream in his 20s, traveling to games with his umpire friends, and Patrick compares that to his own years touring as a musician at 30. Then we turn to the ending and that sudden line of cars headed for the ballfield. It doesn't quite make sense. It works anyway, because the movie tells us it will happen and asks us to go along.

33:48 - TERRENCE MANN IS A GHOST

We talk about how the film makes small, deliberate choices, including a long cross-country drive that bonds Ray and Terence Mann without showing us most of what they say. Then we get lost in a real argument: when Terence Mann walks into the cornfield, does he die, become a ghost, or just look around and come back? One of us is very sure he's fine. The rest of us aren't buying it.

41:06 - THIS MOVIE IS SO MIDWESTERN

Everyone in this movie meets the impossible with calm, polite understatement, and we decide that makes it very Midwestern. One of us shares a story about saying a blandly cheerful "oh, cool" to someone whose job was scooping eyeballs out of corpses, which proves the point. We wonder what else makes it feel so Midwestern, and land on its father and son heart.

43:23 - ARCHIE MOONLIGHT GRAHAM'S STORY WRAPS UP WITH PATRICK'S DAD

We come back around to Patrick's dad. His umpiring career was cut short, and a Little League field back home was renamed Mike Fleming Field in his honor. It's the other half of Moonlight Graham's story, and it leads us back to Ray and the catch he and his own father never had.

0:00 - COLD OPEN

1:23 - WHO BROUGHT "FIELD OF DREAMS" AND WHY?

2:27 - WHAT'S THE NUMBER ONE THING WE WANT TO SAY ABOUT "FIELD OF DREAMS"

5:17 - WHAT SHOULD YOU KNOW GOING INTO "FIELD OF DREAMS"

6:35 - A VERY FUNNY INTRODUCTION OF PATRICK

7:55 - PATRICK'S EMAIL ABOUT HIS FATHER

10:14 - WHEN WERE WE IN AND OUT OF "FIELD OF DREAMS"

13:42 - JOE HAS VISITED EVERY BASEBALL STADIUM IN THE US

20:57 - ROBBY READ LITERALLY ALL OF HIS NOTES ON FIELD OF DREAMS

23:50 - ROBBY CRIES

28:41 - SONS MATCHING FATHERS

30:42 - HOW THEY GOT THE TRAFFIC JAM IN "FIELD OF DREAMS" BEFORE CGI

33:48 - TERRENCE MANN IS A GHOST

41:06 - THIS MOVIE IS SO MIDWESTERN

43:23 - ARCHIE MOONLIGHT GRAHAM'S STORY WRAPS UP WITH PATRICK'S DAD

The corn grew almost too well, so when Costner first hears "If you build it, he will come," he had to walk onto a foot-high platform. [Source]

The famous line everyone quotes as "if you build it, they will come" is actually never said in the film, what it's actually saying is "If you build it, he will come."

The emotional final shot of an endless line of headlights heading toward the field wasn't a visual effect at all; the scene was filmed with the help of local Iowans, with thousands of Iowa residents lined up in their cars on the road to the farm, tuning into a local radio station for the director's instructions. To sell the illusion of a growing crowd, town residents drove up to the field with their headlights on, then drove away with their headlights off to make it look like more and more people kept arriving.

James Earl Jones almost turned down the role entirely, it was his wife who convinced him to accept the role of Terence Mann, though she warned him the long baseball speech would end up cut from the film, a speech that instead became one of the movie's most quoted moments.

The film's title wasn't the original plan. It was originally supposed to be titled "Shoeless Joe" like the novel, but that title tested poorly, with audiences thinking it referred to a hobo or that Costner was playing a homeless man, prompting Universal to switch it to "Field of Dreams" instead.

Phil Alden Robinson, who wrote and directed Field of Dreams, went on to write Sneakers and direct The Sum of All Fears, among other projects.

If you want to keep digging into this one after the episode, a few other stops are worth your time. The Film Stories podcast's 200th episode actually landed an interview with writer/director Phil Alden Robinson himself, who candidly tells the story of how the film came together, the challenges they faced, and its legacy, a rare conversation since he doesn't do many interviews. For a more debate-driven take, the Best Film Ever podcast digs into how the film taps into themes of regret, reconciliation, and belief while also wrestling with whether it's overrated.

New to The Arc? Start with Episode 01: The Princess Bride .

Sound design via Freesound.org and Envato.

• S: tv_turn_on.mp3 by morgantj | License: Attribution 4.0
• S: Dragging baseball bat by anochrist | License: Creative Commons 0
• S: Soundwalk_IowaCity.wav by djangoman11 | License: Creative Commons 0
• S: 230719 Screen Door, sliding open close, backyard, MixPre AT975r EM272s, Stratford by TRP | License: Creative Commons 0
• S: Jogging on dead grass.wav by Edelhanie | License: Attribution 4.0
• S: corn field 1123AM 220811_0490.wav by klankbeeld | License: Attribution 4.0
• S: [ MPooman ] Baseball Glove Sounds (High Quality) by MPooman | License: Creative Commons 0

Hobbs & Shaw has a climactic dawn battle that goes from pitch black to full daylight in about two minutes of screen time. Can the sun really rise that fast? We brought in actual scientist for an answer and a masterclass in using science for storytelling.

As always, we're more than a film review podcast, and this is the proof: a years-long movie argument between Cole and Jaclynn gets settled by an actual astronomer.

Jaclynn has been saying for years that the sunrise in this scene is impossible, a jump cut from midnight to noon. Cole has spent just as long insisting she's wrong, and this episode is him finally bringing in reinforcements. As Cole puts it going in, "I don't think it's about the sunrise." It's Virgo season, and this is what a Virgo does with a grudge: proves it with data.

Zoe Learner Ponterio manages the Spacecraft Planetary Image Facility at Cornell, the Ivy League school where Carl Sagan spent 25 years as a professor of astronomy and which still runs a Carl Sagan Institute today. She got there after years on NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers science team, working the Spirit and Opportunity missions. She almost went to Harvard instead. Her reasoning: "I at one point just looked at the Harvard dean and said, do you have a Mars rover? He was like, no. I was like, well, I guess it's a no."

Zoe does the actual math: the fastest a sunrise can physically happen is at the equator on an equinox, and it clocks in around 128 seconds. At the poles, a sunrise can effectively last forever. Hobbs & Shaw is shot near the equator in Samoa, which gives the filmmakers real cover for a fast sunrise, just not one that stretches into full midday light the way the scene eventually does.

The closest thing to a ruling: Jaclynn walks the scene beat by beat, cut by cut, and catches herself mid-sentence, she'd been misreading one key shot for years, mentally borrowing the framing from an old TV show. Cole, smelling blood, sums her own argument back to her until she has to say the quiet part out loud. He gets his line for the record too, repeated three times for emphasis: "You were not wrong."

Zoe uses science the same way the hosts use cameras and editing, as a tool for telling a story people care about. Her closing bit ties it back to the episode's own cold open: imagining what an alien visiting Earth would find remarkable about something we take for granted, in her case, the size and closeness of our moon. Her line lands the episode: "Every single film shoot should have an astronomer."

• Jaclynn goes in trying to prove Cole right instead of herself, and ends up seeing the sunrise shot differently for the first time in years.
• Robby never noticed the sped-up sunrise at all until Jaclynn pointed it out, and defends it from a pure craft angle: once the sun is up, the sun gets to be up.
• Cole sits on his own sunrise-shooting story from filming in the Galapagos until the very end of the debate, then finally uses it as backup.
• Zoe walks in to referee a movie argument and walks out making the case for why scientists and storytellers are sometimes doing the same job.

This is the first in an occasional series bringing in people from outside film, people who aren't filmmakers or critics, to look at a scene through their expertise.

• 0:00 Cold Open
• 1:31 Introducing the Astronomer
• 4:05 The Problem With the Sunrise
• 5:14 Why the Astronomer Chose Cornell Over Harvard
• 8:04 Personal Nitpicks About Film Continuity
• 12:31 When Were We In or Out
• 16:01 What You Need to Know Going In
• 20:09 The Astronomer's Problem With the Moon in Movies
• 20:50 Sketch: All-Hands Stand-Up Moon Meeting
• 22:18 How to Tell if the Moon Is Right
• 25:25 The Shortest and Longest Sunrise, a Thought Experiment
• 29:50 The Number One Thing About the Climax
• 33:20 Filming Sunrise and Sunset at the Equator
• 37:06 Science in Film
• 41:30 What Is Science Fiction (Because Star Wars Isn't)
• 46:19 What Did We Learn
• 49:38 Going Beat by Beat Through the Sunrise
• 1:01:30 The Astronomer on Storytelling

This isn't our first brawl in this particular light. Back when we just talked about the movie like normal people, before a Cornell scientist got involved, we did an episode called: Hobbes & Shaw - Virgo Season Continues with a Story Told Almost Entirely in Visuals

Did you know people HATE Alejandro González Iñárritu's films, walked out of Amores Perros during its Premiere, and stopped being friends with Cole because of it? And on that note: we dig into why a movie this technically towering is so hard to actually love.

Amores Perros (2000), starring Gael García Bernal and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is Cole's birthday pick this season on The Arc (thearc.fm), and it does not go the way birthday picks are supposed to go. The film is a landmark of Mexican cinema, told in three interlocking stories connected by a single car crash — but we spend most of the episode arguing about whether its dog-as-metaphor structure is a stroke of genius or almost embarrassingly literal. Robby gets attached to the wrong story and never recovers, Jaclynn spends two years thinking the title meant "I Love Dogs," and Cole realizes live, on mic, that the film is basically about his parents.

Streaming availability as of 2026-07-08 (GOOD LUCK//SORRY)

• Apple TV (rent or buy)
• Amazon Prime Video (rent or buy)
• Fandango at Home (rent or buy)
• Tubi (free streaming)

New episodes of The Arc arrive roughly once a week, but they are ephemeral beings that sometimes take longer — you're encouraged to start from the beginning with Episode 01: The Princess Bride.

RSS

Amores Perros is Alejandro González Iñárritu's 2000 debut, three interlocking Mexico City stories bolted together by a single car crash — a dog-fighting kid trying to run away with his brother's wife, a supermodel whose lapdog vanishes under the floorboards of her new apartment, and El Chivo, an ex-guerrilla turned assassin with a pack of strays and a daughter he abandoned. It's the film that put Iñárritu, screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto on the map, and, as Cole puts it, nearly every "raw, visceral, authentic" film made since has been speaking its language whether it knows it or not. You cannot legally stream or even buy it in the United States, which is how Cole ended up getting a library card specifically to check out a DVD, and how one very kind librarian stopped talking to him the moment she saw what he'd put on hold.

This is a birthday-film episode — each of us picks an all-time favorite to revisit, and this one is Cole's, which turns out to be the whole show. Robby found it electric and beautifully shot and was fully in until the story handed off to the second couple, at which point he got genuinely angry, a reaction he almost never has to movies. Jaclynn, who spent two years believing the title meant "I Love Dogs" because she's half Mexican and coasting on overconfidence, was out at the DVD menu and had to switch off her empathy to get through the dog violence at all. And then, somewhere in the third act — the dead father breaking into his daughter's apartment to frame a photo of himself over her bed, the assassin's whole arc — it stops being a movie about a movie and becomes Cole visibly split open, recognizing his own parents in the supermodel and the man who ruined himself caring for her. Watching a friend realize in real time that his favorite film is a diagnosis is not comfortable, and we don't pretend it is.

What we actually argue about is whether the dog-as-metaphor is too on the nose (each animal an externalized organ of its owner's suffering), whether it's just a less pop-culture-poisoned Pulp Fiction or something genuinely its own, and why nearly every shot sits at a strange, low, claustrophobic angle — Jaclynn's theory being that we're often at dog height, Cole's being that a frame taken from the eyeline of an average-height man has added nothing to anything, ever. There's a clip of Iñárritu himself in here talking about the banned bleach-bypass process that gave the film its milky, over-contrasted blue, and a running, affectionate grudge about how Cole's own best camerawork is quietly haunted by this movie's final shot. It ends where it began: Jaclynn asking Cole if he's okay. He isn't, and he'd like a good cry and a full night's sleep. We'd recommend the film, and we'd recommend not watching it alone.

02:12 — Who Brought Amores Perros, and How Do You Describe Amores Perros?

We describe Amores Perros as a maximalist film that mirrors its director's personality, then joke about our shared "killjoy" horoscope sign before comparing how graphically each of our two birthday-film picks handles a dog's death — Robby's film only implies it happens offscreen while Cole's shows the animal's visible suffering in bloody, sound-designed detail — with Cole noting he can tell a long story about what he already knew about the film going in.

04:33 — Robby Actually Reviews The Film!

Robby explains that he watched Amores Perros for the first time because it's Cole's favorite movie, praises how watchable, energetic, and visually striking it is (especially its portrayal of Mexico City), admits the dog violence shocked him but argues it works as a meaningful metaphor for how the characters treat each other, and then Jaclynn teases Cole for being visibly moved before comparing the experience of rewatching a beloved film as an adult to realizing it exposes uncomfortable truths about the person who loves it.

08:46 — How Jaclynn Found Out The Film Showed Dog Fighting

Jaclynn tells a long personal story about how, based on a matching-hat gift from Cole and her mistaken belief that "Amores Perros" translates simply to "I Love Dogs," she spent two years thinking his favorite film was a sweet movie about dog ownership until a friend's horrified reaction clued her in that it actually involves extensive dogfighting and animal death, which leads the group into a discussion of why on-screen animal harm disturbs audiences more than human violence and how convincingly the film's dog-death scenes were faked.

23:19 — When Were You In or Out for Amores Perros?

Jaclynn explains she was "out" on Amores Perros before even watching it (after hearing about the animal deaths and half-jokingly citing writing "the DVD menu" in our shared notes doc as her breakout point), listing the elements she normally likes in a film that this one still didn't win her over with, while the others push back and single out the movie's closing shot as a standout, with one host arguing it visibly influenced Cole's own cinematography (comparing it to a shot he later used), which Cole first denies and then half-admits.

27:19 — Audiences Walked Out of the Film

We rib Cole for picking such an on-the-nose, stylistically maximalist favorite, then play a clip of Iñárritu describing how audiences actually walked out during screenings at Cannes and the New York Film Festival, before comparing our own entry points into his filmography (mostly starting with Birdman, which we disagree about) and debate whether Amores Perros is a weaker, more stylistically derivative cousin of Pulp Fiction.

29:06 — The Original Instagram Filter?

We (joined by a clip of director Alejandro González Iñárritu) discuss how the film's bleach-bypass color processing gave it a high-contrast, blue-tinted look we associate with early Instagram filters, then pivot into analyzing how tightly framed, claustrophobic shots (including ones apparently filmed from a dog's-eye perspective) reinforce the characters' trapped circumstances, before riffing into a personal tangent about hating photographs shot from generic average-adult-eye-level height.

41:03 — The Dogs Are a Metaphor.

We debate whether Amores Perros' dogs function as heavy-handed but effective metaphors for their owners' suffering (using the scorpion-and-frog fable to explain the "rehabilitated killer" dog), then Robby admits he lost investment when the film jumped between its three interlocking stories, while Jaclynn describes being annoyed by the film's self-conscious stylistic flourishes before deciding that "announcing itself" as a film can still be valid craft, and we praise the movie's gritty, lived-in production detail before Cole starts to argue, through tears he can't fully explain, that the film invented the modern raw, visceral style so many later films have chased.

58:06 — The Craziest Thing About The Story

We marvel incredulously at the film's Daniel storyline, arguing it makes no sense that a character would let a dog starve under his floorboards for days rather than immediately tearing them up to save it, one host suggests this is a deliberate Tell-Tale Heart-style literary allusion rather than a plot hole, and we then play a clip of Iñárritu explaining that the dog-under-the-floor detail was drawn from a real story a friend told him about an abandoned family whose floor had to be broken open after their dog died and started to smell.

0:00 - Can a Movie Ruin a Friendship? (natural: 0:23)

2:12 - Who Brought Amores Perros, and How Do You Describe Amores Perros?

4:33 - Robby Actually Reviews The Film!

7:15 - Amores Perros is NOT a Popular Film! Who Knew?!

8:46 - How Jaclynn Found Out The Film Showed Dog Fighting

17:06 - Dog Training

17:56 - Seeing Amores Perros 20 Years Ago

23:19 - When Were You In or Out for Amores Perros?

27:19 - Audiences Walked Out of the Film

29:06 - The Original Instagram Filter?

41:03 - The Dogs Are a Metaphor.

50:55 - NO ONE ON SET HAD EVER MADE A MOVIE

58:06 - The Craziest Thing About The Story

1:00:11 - FAVORITE LINES

During the fights, no dogs were actually hurt — the animals were simply playing, with their muzzles wrapped in near-invisible fishing line so they physically couldn't bite each other, and the "dead" or "dying" dogs seen on camera were heavily sedated under supervision from Mexico's SPCA. [Source]

To keep any single animal from being sedated too often, the crew actually used several different dogs standing in for what looks like one dog on screen, so that the same dog was not under sedation for more than half an hour and not more than once a day. [Source]

The film's signature look came from Iñárritu and Prieto testing a bleach-bypass film technique years earlier on advertising work, refining it specifically so he could one day use it on the debut feature he was already planning in his head. Iñárritu has said that from the beginning of his experimentation with bleach bypass, he was seeking to create an aesthetic that would capture the spirit of Mexico City. Despite how widely imitated that grainy, desaturated blue look became afterward, Iñárritu and Prieto used the method only once more themselves, for their follow-up feature, 21 Grams (2003). [Source]

The opening car crash that ties all three stories together wasn't a single simple setup — it was captured using nine cameras running at once, including two positioned on rooftops across the street and one hidden inside a trash can. [Source]

Assembling the film's three separate story strands into one coherent whole was such a challenge that it took Iñárritu seven months in the editing room to get the structure right. [Source]

If you want to keep pulling on this thread, a few things are worth your time.

The MUBI Podcast devoted an episode to the film's 25th anniversary, where host Rico Gagliano cruises around Mexico City's sprawl to learn about the local movie industry's history and culture, with help from guests like Gael García Bernal and Eugenio Caballero — it's the rare piece that gets the story straight from the people who made it, including a companion conversation where Gagliano gets the origin story of Amores Perros straight from Iñárritu and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto.

For the Spanish-speaking corner of the audience, Cine Aparte con Fernanda Solórzano revisited the film on its 25th anniversary rerelease, with Solórzano discussing why, 25 years later, it remains a cinematic and sensory experience that still fuels discussion. Solórzano's take carries extra weight since she's one of the two critics who wrote the liner notes for the Criterion release.

And on the page rather than in your ears, Juan Villoro's Criterion essay, "The Dogs That Heralded the Millennium", is the single best deep dive on the film's social context — Villoro traces how the movie captures the contradictions of its moment, with some characters aspiring to glamour while others struggle amid distressing poverty and social injustice, and unpacks the title itself, noting that in Spanish, amores perros refers to relationships that are cursed, impossible, and foolish, with perros functioning as an adjective meaning "stubborn" or "dogged," while the dogs themselves embody both the best and worst attributes of the human characters — which is basically the entire argument the show spent an hour making, laid out in a few pages.

New to The Arc? Start with Episode 02: The Fantastic Four if you like Marvel movies — and want to hate us forever and tell your friends how lame we are.

Sound design via Freesound.org and Envato.

This episode argues that Airplane isn't a joke machine bolted onto a plot but a plot that never once stops being played straight — the "clothing line" every single joke hangs from — and that's precisely why deadpan dramatic actors, not comedians, were the only people who could have made it work.

Is Airplane! (1980) actually the funniest movie ever made — and does it hold up? In this episode, three hosts break down the disaster-parody classic joke by joke, arguing that its real genius isn't the gags (though by their count there's a new one every 20 seconds) but the fact that it plays a completely straight, lifted-from-a-real-drama plot dead serious underneath all of them. They also dig into which of its dated jokes still land and which ones don't. You don't need to have seen the film to follow along — though you'll probably want to watch it after.

Streaming availability as of 2026-07-04.

• Paramount+ (subscription)
• MGM+ (subscription)
• Peacock (Premium tiers)
• Kanopy (free with library card)
• Tubi (free with ads)
• Pluto TV / fuboTV (free with ads)
• Rent or buy: Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Google Play

This one's not hiding from you — it's on basically every platform, free tier, paid tier, and rental storefront simultaneously, which feels appropriate for a movie built on the philosophy of throwing every joke technique at the wall at once. If you don't already have a library card for Kanopy, honestly, that's the real crime here — free is free, Shirley.

New episodes of The Arc arrive roughly once a week, but they are ephemeral beings that sometimes take longer — you're encouraged to start from the beginning because you do not have to have seen the film we're talking about to enjoy the episode — heck, sometimes some of us haven't even watched the film we're talking about.

Spotify (link needed)

Pocket Casts (link needed)

RSS

Start from Episode 01: The Princess Bride

Airplane! is the 1980 disaster-movie parody where a traumatized war pilot has to land a passenger jet after everyone in the cockpit gets food poisoning — and where, roughly every twenty seconds for eighty-eight minutes, someone tells a joke. It's the one with "Surely you can't be serious" / "I am serious, and don't call me Shirley." It's the one where the whole ridiculous machine works because the actors — Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, men who'd spent decades playing things dead straight — play it dead straight here too. The dramatic plot is real, and it never wobbles; the film just hangs joke after joke off it like a clothing line. Nearly every comedy that came after it, from Naked Gun to the Farrelly brothers to Family Guy, is standing on this movie's shoulders whether it knows it or not.

We watched it three in a room, laughing harder than usual, and did not fully agree about it — which turned out to be the point. Robby grew up quoting it off a friend's Betamax; it's a foundational text for him. Jaclynn thinks it's a genuine comedy masterclass and also didn't especially like it, because she wants a movie to take her somewhere darker than "here is a joke, here is another joke." Cole spent the entire episode confidently insisting it was a 1976 Mel Brooks film and a sequel to Blazing Saddles, which it is none of — a bit he committed to so thoroughly that when his own landlord (an MIT-and-Wharton-educated woman) correctly told him three guys from Wisconsin actually wrote it, he decided she must be wrong.

So somewhere between counting the jokes (a minimum of 264, we did the math), arguing about whether the film's uglier gags are punching at something or just punching, and Robby quoting himself quoting Seth Rogen on why comedy has to live a little outside of proper society, we ended up talking less about whether Airplane! is funny — it is — and more about what it actually takes to make something look this easy. Turns out it takes a lot, and turns out you can spend two hours finding that out and still keep looking at Dad for approval afterward.

04:47 — Robby Actually Reviews The Film!

Robby, Cole, and Jaclynn drift from talk about how Robby's friend and his tough Michigan girlfriend will react to the podcast into a long tangent about Jaclynn's road trip through Detroit and the Upper Peninsula, then troubleshoot mic/recording noise issues with jokes about head-mounted mic gear, before circling back to note that Robby (with his friend Sean) grew up watching and quoting this movie constantly.

13:34 — DID JACLYNN NOT LIKE AIRPLANE???

Cole, Robby, and Jaclynn get sidetracked joking about casting Allison Williams in a hypothetical remake before untangling a mixed-up back-and-forth over who's supposed to answer the question of what they knew going into Airplane, eventually landing on Robby's take that the film works because its jokes grow directly out of a genuinely earnest story (which is what influenced comedians like Seth MacFarlane and Adam McKay), while Jaclynn admits she thought she'd seen the movie before but realizes she'd only ever caught its most famous clips.

17:24 — Airplane! is a remake? A parody? No?!?!

Jaclynn and Cole compare Airplane!'s serious plot to a "clothing line" that jokes hang on, estimate the film has at least 250 jokes (maybe closer to 480), and Jaclynn recalls specific gags she already knew before seeing the movie—like the inflatable autopilot and "don't call me Shirley"—which leads her into a tangent about how the nun/boy reading joke reminded her of the Australian comedy show Danger 5.

19:36 — It's a Dramatic Movie!

Cole and Robby recommend other spoof comedies like Danger 5 and Inspector Ike as similar in style, then Jaclynn brings up how Airplane's influence shows up in later memes, describing the recurring gif of a woman being repeatedly slapped harder each year as a joke about escalating chaos.

23:30 — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Also Makes Fun of Cole

Robby, Cole, and Jaclynn go back and forth on their differing reactions to Airplane, with Jaclynn admitting she prefers darker, more emotionally complex stories over pure comedy while Robby and Cole push back and needle each other about it, before the three debate whether the film's uncomfortable jokes—especially a running pedophilia gag and moments of misogyny and racial humor—work as self-aware satire or just haven't aged well.

34:29 — Problematic? Not Sooo Much

Cole tells a story about his highly educated landlord insisting Airplane was written by three people from her Wisconsin hometown, which Cole wrongly took as confirmation of his mistaken belief that it's a Mel Brooks movie, and Robby and Jaclynn tease him for not questioning his own error and for dismissing her correct expertise, while also comparing the film's influence to later comedies like Hot Shots and The Naked Gun.

43:11 — Dad Explains Post-Modernism Bit

The three hosts riff on a shared bit of dialogue with lots of overlapping repetition, then veer into a tangent about Alex Jones and InfoWars being bought by The Onion, before settling into a discussion of whether each of them stayed awake through Airplane and how they personally rate it as a comedy versus a drama with jokes layered on top.

53:17 — The Meanest Joke Ever?

Cole, Robby, and Jaclynn go back and forth on whether a joke in the film still lands today, joking about the characters' Jewish identity, and Jaclynn says her real complaint about the "Air Israel beard" joke isn't that it's offensive but that it was shot too cheaply to do the joke justice, a point Cole then repeats back word for word.

0:00 - Can a Movie Ruin a Friendship? (natural: 0:23)

4:47 - Robby Actually Reviews The Film!

9:30 - FUNNIEST MOVIE EVER MADE

11:05 - WHAT JACLYNN KNEW GOING IN

13:34 - DID JACLYNN NOT LIKE AIRPLANE???

17:24 - Airplane! is a remake? A parody? No?!?!

19:36 - It's a Dramatic Movie!

20:46 - Unhinged Mel Brooks Bit

23:30 - Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Also Makes Fun of Cole

29:00 - Why Robby Loved The Film This Time Around

30:52 - When Was Cole In or Out?

34:29 - Problematic? Not Sooo Much

43:11 - Dad Explains Post-Modernism Bit

53:17 - The Meanest Joke Ever?

53:58 - Jaclynn Flies a Plane

Directors (co-directed, also co-writers) — "ZAZ":

- David Zucker — also known for co-creating The Naked Gun franchise, and directing The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), Ruthless People (1986), and BASEketball (1998).

- Jerry Zucker — went on to direct Ghost (1990) and First Knight (1995).

- Jim Abrahams — later co-created Top Secret! and the Naked Gun series with the Zuckers.

Screenwriters: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, adapting Zero Hour! (1957), credited to Hall Bartlett and John C. Champion.

Producers:

- Jon Davison (Producer) — also RoboCop (1987), Starship Troopers (1997), The 6th Day (2000).

- Howard W. Koch (Executive Producer) — also The Manchurian Candidate (1962), The Odd Couple (1968), Ghost (1990).

Cinematographer: Joseph F. Biroc — won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for The Towering Inferno (1974); also shot It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Blazing Saddles (1974).

Composer: Elmer Bernstein — also The Ten Commandments, The Magnificent Seven, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Escape, Animal House (1978), Ghostbusters (1984).

• Robert Hays as Ted Striker — also Take This Job and Shove It (1981), Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993), Starman (1986-87).
• Julie Hagerty as Elaine Dickinson — also Lost in America (1985), What About Bob? (1991), Marriage Story (2019).
• Leslie Nielsen as Dr. Rumack — also the Naked Gun trilogy, Forbidden Planet (1956).
• Robert Stack as Captain Rex Kramer — also The Untouchables (TV), Unsolved Mysteries (host), The High and the Mighty (1954).
• Lloyd Bridges as Steve McCroskey — also Sea Hunt (TV).
• Peter Graves as Captain Clarence Oveur — also Mission: Impossible (TV), Stalag 17.
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as Roger Murdock — the co-pilot, playing a spoof of himself. At the time of filming, the L.A. Lakers legend was still mid-career when he signed on for the role.

• WGA Award, Best Adapted Screenplay (1981) — WIN
• Golden Globe Award, Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy (1981) — NOMINATION
• BAFTA Award, Best Screenplay — NOMINATION
• National Film Registry (Library of Congress) — inducted 2010

No Academy Award nominations or wins.

Airplane! is a parody based on the 1957 film Zero Hour!, from which it borrows the plot, central characters, and some dialogue nearly verbatim. Zero Hour! (1957) — Wikipedia

This episode argues that Back to the Future's whole plot is smuggled into the audience's lap before Marty's face even appears onscreen, you get literally the whole film encapsulated in one shot.

We revisit Back to the Future (1985) — and discover, mid-recording, that half the room has never actually seen it. Robby comes in ready to argue it's "the most perfect movie ever made," while Jaclynn realizes she'd spent years confusing it with a Huey Lewis jukebox musical. It's a close, funny look at why the film's opening ten minutes might be the tightest piece of screenwriting in blockbuster history — no prior viewing (or memory of viewing) required.

Streaming availability as of 2026-07-04.

Sources conflict a bit on the exact home platform (some say Netflix, some Peacock, some neither), but rental/purchase options across Amazon, Apple TV, and others are consistently confirmed.

Where to watch:

- Rent or buy: Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play, Fandango at Home, YouTube

New episodes of The Arc arrive roughly once a week, but they are ephemeral beings that sometimes take longer — you're encouraged to start from the beginning because you do not have to have seen the film we're talking about to enjoy the episode — heck, sometimes some of us haven't even watched the film we're talking about.

Spotify (link needed)

Pocket Casts (link needed)

RSS

Start from Episode 01: The Princess Bride

Back to the Future (1985) is the one where a kid named Marty McFly accidentally rides Doc Brown's plutonium-powered DeLorean back to 1955, nearly erases himself from existence by getting between his teenage parents, and has to engineer them into falling in love before he fades out of the family photo. It's the movie Carl Sagan reportedly called the most accurate depiction of theoretical time travel he'd ever seen, and its opening two minutes — clocks ticking before you see anything, a coffee pot that never fills, dog food piling up, a skateboard rolling past the missing plutonium — quietly contain the entire film before a single face appears on screen. We spend a good while on exactly that sequence, because once you notice the burnt toast toasting itself over and over, you can't un-notice it.

Here's the thing this episode is actually about, though. We committed to watching the trilogy out of order — you can't watch Part II without first watching the original, so obviously we started with the original — and somewhere in the first two hours Jaclynn realized she had never actually seen this movie. She was certain she had. She'd talked about it at parties. She thought she and Cole had seen it together on Broadway (that was The Heart of Rock and Roll; different Huey Lewis entirely). Robby, meanwhile, has this film memorized across formats and cable-TV reruns and arrives with a prepared list of controversial takes and unilateral decisions about which franchises you're allowed to watch out of order — which is how the episode opens with Jaclynn sarcastically welcoming everyone to "Robby's solo podcast on Back to the Future."

So this is less a review than three people watching a beloved classic more seriously than anyone has in years — Robby cataloging every format he's seen it on, Jaclynn coming out of what she describes as an amnesia coma, and Dad bringing a movie he then admits he's never technically watched, right before delivering the Carl Sagan–was-a-Cornell-scientist fact he was clearly saving. If you've never seen Back to the Future, you'll leave knowing why its clockwork screenplay still holds up. If you've seen it a hundred times on cable, you may want to double-check that you actually have.

• Robert Zemeckis — Director — also: Back to the Future (1985), Forrest Gump (1994), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
• Robert Zemeckis — Screenwriter — also: Back to the Future (1985), Romancing the Stone (1984), 1941 (1979)
• Bob Gale — Screenwriter — also: Back to the Future (1985), Back to the Future Part II (1989), Back to the Future Part III (1990)
• Bob Gale — Producer — also: Back to the Future (1985)
• Neil Canton — Producer — also: Back to the Future (1985), Back to the Future Part II (1989), Back to the Future Part III (1990)
• Steven Spielberg — Executive Producer — also: Back to the Future (1985), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Jurassic Park (1993)
• Kathleen Kennedy — Executive Producer — also: Back to the Future (1985)
• Frank Marshall — Executive Producer — also: Back to the Future (1985)
• Dean Cundey — Cinematographer — also: Back to the Future (1985), Romancing the Stone (1984), Jurassic Park (1993)
• Alan Silvestri — Composer — also: Back to the Future (1985), Forrest Gump (1994), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

• Michael J. Fox — Marty McFly — also: Family Ties (1982), Back to the Future Part II (1989), Spin City (1996)
• Christopher Lloyd — Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown — also: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Taxi (1978), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
• Lea Thompson — Lorraine Baines McFly — also: Red Dawn (1984), Howard the Duck (1986), Switched at Birth (2011)
• Crispin Glover — George McFly — also: Willard (2003), Charlie's Angels (2000), Alice in Wonderland (2010)
• Thomas F. Wilson — Biff Tannen — also: Back to the Future Part II (1989), Back to the Future Part III (1990), Freaks and Geeks (1999)
• Claudia Wells — Jennifer Parker — also: Back to the Future (1985)
• Marc McClure — Dave McFly — also: Superman (1978), Superman II (1980), Freaky Friday (1976)
• Wendie Jo Sperber — Linda McFly — also: Bosom Buddies (1980), Undercover Angel (1988)
• James Tolkan — Mr. Strickland — also: Top Gun (1986), WarGames (1983)
• George DiCenzo — Sam Baines — also: Murder, She Wrote (1984), Law & Order (1990), NYPD Blue (1993)
• Harry Waters Jr. — Marvin Berry — also: Back to the Future (1985)
• Billy Zane — Match — also: Titanic (1997), Dead Calm (1989)

Academy Awards (Oscars)

- Best Sound Effects Editing — WIN At the 1986 Academy Awards, Back to the Future received one award for Best Sound Effects Editing (Charles L. Campbell and Robert Rutledge).

- Best Original Screenplay — NOMINATION Best Original Screenplay (Gale and Zemeckis)

- Best Sound (Mixing) — NOMINATION Best Sound (Bill Varney, B. Tennyson Sebastian II, Robert Thirlwell, and William B. Kaplan)

- Best Original Song ("The Power of Love") — NOMINATION Best Original Song ("The Power of Love")

Golden Globe Awards (43rd, 1986)

- Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy — NOMINATION

- Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy (Michael J. Fox) — NOMINATION

- Best Screenplay — NOMINATION

- Best Original Song ("The Power of Love") — NOMINATION

Back to the Future received four nominations at the 43rd Golden Globe Awards, for Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy), Best Actor in a Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy) (Fox), Best Original Song ("The Power of Love"), and Best Screenplay (Gale and Zemeckis).

BAFTA Awards (39th, 1986)

- Best Film — NOMINATION

- Best Original Screenplay — NOMINATION

- Best Editing — NOMINATION

- Best Production Design — NOMINATION

- Best Special Visual Effects — NOMINATION

At the 39th British Academy Film Awards, Back to the Future received five nominations, including Best Film, Best Original Screenplay (Gale and Zemeckis), Best Visual Effects (Pike and Ralston), Best Production Design (Paull), and Best Editing (Schmidt and Keramidas).

Writers Guild of America Awards

- Best Original Screenplay — NOMINATION Writers Guild Awards (WGA) - Movies from 1985 · nom. Best Original Screenplay (Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale)

National Board of Review

- Top Ten Films — WIN/RECOGNITION NBR (National Board of Review) - Awards for 1985 · nom. Top Ten Films

Saturn Awards (13th, Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films)

- Best Science Fiction Film — WIN

- Best Actor (Michael J. Fox) — WIN

- Best Special Effects — WIN

- Best Director (Robert Zemeckis) — NOMINATION

- Best Supporting Actress (Lea Thompson) — NOMINATION

At the 13th Saturn Awards, the film won three awards: Best Science Fiction Film, Best Actor (Fox), and Best Special Effects (Pike).

Hugo Award

- Best Dramatic Presentation — WIN It also won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.

David di Donatello Awards (Italy)

- Best Foreign Screenplay — WIN

- Best Foreign Producer (Steven Spielberg) — WIN

Back to the Future performed well internationally: it won Best Foreign Producer (Spielberg) and Best Foreign Screenplay at the David di Donatello awards (Italy)

Japan Academy Prize

- Outstanding Foreign Language Film — WIN Outstanding Foreign Film from the Japan Academy

People's Choice Awards

- Favorite Motion Picture — WIN The film was also named Favorite Motion Picture at the 12th People's Choice Awards.

National Film Registry

- Selected for Preservation — HONOR (non-competitive) In 2007, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Note: The National Film Registry entry is a preservation honor, not a competitive award — included here for completeness since it's a notable ceremony/body you asked about, but it's not a "win" or "nomination" in the competitive sense.

Here are five confirmed, specific production trivia items about Back to the Future (1985) — the kind that change how you understand the film:

1. Eric Stoltz was fired six weeks into filming for being too good at drama.

This isn't just a casting footnote — it reveals how precisely calibrated the film's tone is. Stoltz played Marty as a method actor, insisting on being called "Marty" by the crew even off-camera, and at a table read he reportedly said, "Everybody's laughing, but it's not a comedy, it's a tragedy," adding "My whole family remembers a different history to what I do. It's really very sad." Zemeckis concluded the dramatic approach was actively ruining the film's comedic engine, and Zemeckis has since called firing Stoltz "the worst moment of my career." This directly validates the episode's "Eric Stoltz = overly serious actor" bit — it's rooted in a real, documented on-set clash over tone.

2. Fox was living a double life during the entire shoot.

After being recast, Fox was filming both Family Ties and Back to the Future at the same time — filming Family Ties in the morning, then heading to Back to the Future at night until 3 or 4 a.m. Fox himself later admitted the exhaustion bled into the performance: "I was running on adrenaline. I barely knew where I was and I didn't really know what I was doing. That served the film, because Marty's supposed to be disoriented."

3. The entire third act — plutonium heist and all — was a late rewrite; the original climax was a nuclear test site, not a lightning storm.

Marty and Doc originally had a completely different plan involving a break-in at a nuclear power plant to steal plutonium, rather than the lightning-bolt clock tower sequence. They even briefly considered writing in a nuclear explosion that would wipe out the surrounding city, an idea abandoned due to its massive cost. This means the now-iconic clock tower climax — which the podcast praises as foreshadowed from frame one — was a structural rewrite, not the original design.

4. The time machine wasn't always the DeLorean — it was originally a refrigerator.

Before writers Gale and Zemeckis decided to turn the time machine into a vehicle, they considered making it a refrigerator. Universal later tried to change the car anyway: Universal was offered $40,000 to change the time machine from a DeLorean to a Ford Mustang, which Gale flatly refused.

5. The film's title itself was almost sabotaged by the studio, and Spielberg personally intervened.

The original title was "Spaceman From Pluto," until producer Steven Spielberg stepped in and shut that down. The script's road to production was also brutal: the script for Back to the Future was rejected by studios 44 times, with Columbia calling it "too sweet," Universal saying "time travel movies don't make any money," and Disney calling it "too incestuous."

Since Back to the Future, Zemeckis and Gale haven't written another film together — Gale and Zemeckis haven't collaborated on any new material after the Future trilogy wrapped up, though they still work together on spinoff media, including the musical adaptation that debuted in the UK in 2020. Gale has been vocal that a fourth Back to the Future film isn't happening, instead pointing to the stage version: "We made three terrific movies and people kept asking for more Back to the Future. So we made Back to the Future: The Musical … We're taking it around the world."

Zemeckis, meanwhile, has kept directing solo. His most notable recent film is Here (2024), reuniting him with Tom Hanks and Robin Wright — a drama produced and directed by Zemeckis, co-written with Eric Roth from Richard McGuire's graphic novel, using a single locked-down camera shot across generations, with digital de-aging applied to the cast. It was the sixth collaboration between Zemeckis and Hanks. He's since moved on to a new project: Jennifer Lopez will star in Netflix's adaptation of "The Last Mrs. Parrish," with Zemeckis set to direct — a psychological thriller about a con-artist who targets a wealthy couple, infiltrating them by befriending the wife and seducing the husband.

Here are a few resources for listeners who want to go deeper on Back to the Future (1985):

1. (sub)Text: "Time and Taboo in Back to the Future" — A philosophy-and-literature podcast episode where Wes Alwan and Erin O'Luanaigh discuss the 1985 film and how securing the provisions for one's own future depends on two modes of confrontation, exploring life's big questions through a close reading of the film. It's a good pick for listeners who want a more philosophical, thematic take beyond the "perfectly written" craft angle this episode focuses on. (https://subtextpodcast.com/back-to-the-future-zemeckis-1985/)
2. The Script Lab's plot-point breakdown of Back to the Future — A structural essay that walks through how the young Doc Brown of 1955 agrees to help Marty get back to 1985, and how Marty's disruption of the timeline causes his siblings to start vanishing from a photograph, useful for listeners who want a scene-by-scene companion to the episode's discussion of the film's tight plotting. (https://thescriptlab.com/screenplay/five-plot-point-breakdowns/1038-back-to-the-future-1985/)
3. Arc Studio Blog's screenplay breakdown — This essay applies the "Save the Cat" beat-structure framework to the film, noting that the opening image is a ticking clock and a series of pendulums fixed at 5 minutes to 8 o'clock, symbolizing that we have the power to change our future at any moment — a nice complement to the episode's own extended breakdown of the film's clock-filled cold open. (https://www.arcstudiopro.com/blog/back-to-the-future-screenplay-breakdown)

New to The Arc? Start with Episode 02: The Fantastic Four if you like Marvel movies — and want to hate us forever and tell your friends how lame we are.

Elevator 01.wav by LG | License: Attribution 4.0

elevator and dings by alex36917 | License: Attribution 4.0

Huh (disrespect) by soumen59 | License: Creative Commons 0

Thinking Music by GHRockotron3000 | License: Attribution 3.0

The real argument here is that the stage play and the TV show only look like the same story wearing two outfits, when they're actually two different animals entirely — one built to survive a guinea pig's murder in a way the other never could.

It's not quite "a very special episode," but something about this one feels much more personal, but also there is a Chekhov's Gun dance break so don't take it too seriously, please.

A filmed version of the Fleabag stage play was broadcast by the National Theatre UK and Amazon, but these days you have to search something like "Fleabag National Theatre Live (Phoebe Waller-Bridge 2019)" and read a little bit of very obvious Russian. For instance "Видео" means video.

Before it was a TV show, Fleabag was a one-woman play — and on this episode of The Arc, the hosts dig into why the two are actually different animals, not just different formats of the same story. That means a long, close look at the guinea pig's death, the bank manager framing device, and the character of Boo, plus the real backstory of how Phoebe Waller-Bridge and director Vicky Jones built the show from scratch. If you love Fleabag, or you've just always wondered what got cut for TV, this is the episode.

New episodes of The Arc arrive roughly once a week, but they are ephemeral beings that sometimes take longer — you're encouraged to start from the beginning to get to know the show and find your new favorite film to pretend you've watched.

Spotify (link needed)

Pocket Casts (link needed)

RSS

Start from Episode 01: The Princess Bride

Fleabag exists in three forms, and this episode is about the friction between two of them: Phoebe Waller-Bridge's original one-woman stage play, where a woman sits in a chair and does not get up, and the BBC television series most people mean when they say the name. We spent this one on the stage show — the raw thing, the version where the guinea pig gets killed by human hands and the BBC would later say, no, that's not television. If you've only seen the show, you may not know Hillary the guinea pig ever died at all. Jaclynn, who watched the play three times from the second row (close enough, she'll tell you, to have reached out and touched Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and who chose those seats specifically to stare the performer down), forgets it happens every single time.

That forgetting turns out to be the whole argument. On stage there's no literal guinea pig — just Fleabag cradling a fistful of air until "the chattering stops, everything is quiet and she is safe" — so the killing stops being about a guinea pig almost immediately and becomes about grief nobody's processing, a friendship that's already dead, the last thing she loved. Cole makes the case that the guinea pig is a Chekhov's gun that has to go off, that in the play everything is dead and dead, and that on television, surrounded by a cafe wall of guinea pig photos, all you'd be left with is she killed an animal with her bare hands. The three of us don't fully agree — there's a running disagreement about whether Boo's death is a death or, as Cole puts it, "literary murder" — and the not-agreeing is the point.

Jaclynn found this whole thing by accident, going down a rabbit hole looking for a different show entirely, and watched season one hundreds of times through two bottles of Prosecco a night before she got sober in 2019 and finally saw the ending clearly; Robby, on record, spends a good stretch of this episode being deeply uncomfortable, which he insists is great. You don't need to have seen the play — you almost certainly haven't; it's the version that got mislabeled in 2013 as a show about porn's effect on modern women when it's really just a woman living her life, sometimes having sex, mostly grieving. Stay for the part where we forget how it ends, remember we went out afterward and got served ants, and then spend a full minute arguing about whether they were ants or Chipotle-marinated grasshoppers.

• Phoebe Waller-Bridge — Screenwriter — also: Fleabag (2019), Killing Eve (2018), Crashing (2016)
• Phoebe Waller-Bridge — Producer — also: Fleabag (2019)
• Vicky Jones — Director — also: National Theatre Live: Fleabag (2019), Run (2020)
• Tony Grech-Smith — Director — also: National Theatre Live: Fleabag (2019)
• Megan Ellison — Producer — also: National Theatre Live: Fleabag (2019)
• Sue Naegle — Producer — also: National Theatre Live: Fleabag (2019)
• Dawn Davis — Producer — also: National Theatre Live: Fleabag (2019)
• Skye Optican — Producer — also: National Theatre Live: Fleabag (2019)
• Francesca Moody — Producer — also: National Theatre Live: Fleabag (2019)
• Kevin Emrick — Producer — also: National Theatre Live: Fleabag (2019)
• Isobel Waller-Bridge — Composer/Sound Designer — also: National Theatre Live: Fleabag (2019)

• Phoebe Waller-Bridge — Fleabag — also: Fleabag (2016), Killing Eve (2018), Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

This episode is specifically about the stage play ("Fleabag: The Original Play"), not the TV series — so I'll focus on the play's own awards history, separate from the TV show's Emmy/BAFTA/Golden Globe wins (which belong to the television adaptation, a different work).

Here is the awards history for Fleabag: The Original Play (the stage show):

• Scotsman Fringe First Award — WIN (2013)
• The Stage Award for Best Solo Performer — WIN (2013)
• Off West End Theatre Award ("Offie") for Most Promising New Playwright — WIN (2013)
• Off West End Theatre Award ("Offie") for Best Female Performance — WIN (2013)
• Critics' Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright — WIN (2013)
• Susan Smith Blackburn Prize — NOMINATION (Special Commendation)
• Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre — NOMINATION (2014)
• Evening Standard Award for Most Promising New Playwright — NOMINATION (Finalist)
• Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Solo Show — WIN (2019, off-Broadway/New York run)
• Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance — NOMINATION (2019)
• Drama League Award, Distinguished Performance Award — WIN (2019)
• Theatre World Award for Outstanding Broadway or Off-Broadway Debut Performance — WIN (2019)
• Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress — NOMINATION (2020, for the West End revival at Wyndham's Theatre)

The play won the Scotsman Fringe First Award, was given a special commendation for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and was nominated for the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre in 2014, plus Best Entertainment or Comedy Play and Best Actress nominations at the 2020 Oliviers, alongside wins for The Stage Best Solo Performer, an Offie for Most Promising New Playwright, an Offie for Best Female Performance, the Critics' Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright, and the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Solo Show during its 2019 New York run. Waller-Bridge landed a Best Actress nomination for the 2020 Olivier Awards for the show's return to the West End, and the New York transfer also brought nominations/wins including the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, the Drama League's Distinguished Performance Award, the Theatre World Award for Outstanding Broadway or Off-Broadway Debut Performance, and an Evening Standard Award nomination for Most Promising Playwright.

Note: the play itself was not eligible for and did not receive Academy Award, BAFTA Film, Golden Globe, WGA, or DGA recognition — those bodies honor film/TV, not stage plays. The numerous Emmy, Golden Globe, and BAFTA TV wins associated with "Fleabag" belong to the separate television adaptation, not this original stage production.

the Kickstarter origins, BBC's refusal of the guinea pig scene, and the Fringe First award/interview details.Here's a set of confirmed, specific production trivia items about Fleabag: The Original Play:

1. The BBC required the guinea pig to survive on TV — unlike the play, where Fleabag kills it. In the original stage version, Fleabag crushes her injured guinea pig Hilary to death by hand after "Tube Rodent" (called "Bus Rodent" in the TV version) kicks it, but when the BBC commissioned the series, one condition was that unlike the original stage play, the series couldn't kill off Hilary the guinea pig at the end, and Waller-Bridge admits this was probably a good call. [Source]
2. The whole show began as a dare, not a planned project. Fleabag began as a dare: in 2012, Phoebe's friend the comedian Deborah Frances-White, now host of the Guilty Feminist podcast, was organising a stand-up night as part of the London Storytelling Festival, and challenged Phoebe to write a 10-minute piece. That kernel later grew into the full stage show. [Source]
3. The production was crowdfunded and the team lived in cramped conditions to bring it to Edinburgh. For the 2013 Fringe run, "We fundraised with a Kickstarter, packed our bags, slept eight people in a two-bed flat and crossed our fingers that people would come to see what we had made," Waller-Bridge later recalled. The Kickstarter campaign itself was launched to raise £3,955 for the production of a Waller-Bridge-led one-woman show directed by Jones and performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (https://www.edfringe.com/about-us/news-and-blog/phoebe-waller-bridge-and-fleabag-at-the-fringe-10-years-on/, https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/how-fleabag-got-made-70994/)
4. The job-interview framing device from the play was replaced by a bank-loan interview in the TV show so the failing café could be saved rather than shuttered — the play follows the last three days leading up to the cafe closing, with a framing device of the newly unemployed Fleabag attending a job interview after this has happened, while in the series, the job interview was replaced with the loan application interview, allowing the cafe to be rescued after all, and extended into Series 2, where the cafe has actually become quite successful. [Source]
5. Real guinea pigs were cast for the TV series based on their resemblance to celebrities. For the on-screen adaptation, Waller-Bridge talked about casting real guinea pigs for the TV adaptation of the play, which involved selecting the furry creatures based on their celebrity look-a-likes like Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone. [Source]

Since Fleabag, Vicky Jones and Phoebe Waller-Bridge's paths have mostly diverged. Jones wrote and created the HBO series Run (2020), and before that wrote an episode of Killing Eve and script-edited the Fleabag TV adaptation — her most substantial post-Fleabag credit as a solo creator remains Run. Waller-Bridge, meanwhile, has stayed busy on screen and off: she appeared as Helena Shaw in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, released in June 2023, appeared in John Krasinski's fantasy film IF alongside Ryan Reynolds, and is narrating and producing a two-part octopus documentary titled Octopus!, set to premiere on Amazon Prime Video. She's also attached to write and executive produce a Tomb Raider series for Prime Video, though that project has had a bumpy road — she's writing all the episodes, with a co-showrunner and director now brought on to help steer it toward a start of filming.

Given the show's format (one film/work per episode), the most fitting, fully-confirmed standalone title is Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Tease line: We haven't covered Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny yet — but we probably should.

Based on documented, named-source reviews of the Fleabag stage play, here are confirmed quotes from critics (not the cast/crew):

• "One of the great qualities of the writing in both this play and the subsequent TV series is the way it leads us into laughing at things that are quite shocking or reprehensible and then pulls the rug from under us" — theatre.reviews critic, Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag filmed live on stage – review [Source]

This critic called the play "a master class in constructing and writing a script," noting how it "leads us into laughing at things that are quite shocking or reprehensible and then" pulls back.

• "What centers Waller-Bridge's show is not only her razor-sharp wit, and her gift for narrative and comedic surprise, but also her performance" — Thom Geier, TheWrap [Source]

Thom Geier of TheWrap wrote that "What centers Waller-Bridge's show is not only her razor-sharp wit, and her gift for narrative and comedic surprise, but also her performance."

• "If this Fleabag sometimes feels a little like it's all happening in air quotes, it's still a brisk... clever, and indisputably engaging evening of theater" — Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly [Source]

Leah Greenblatt of Entertainment Weekly wrote, "If this Fleabag sometimes feels a little like it's all happening in air quotes, it's still a brisk (only 65 minutes!), clever, and indisputably engaging evening of theater, performed at a level of intimacy that most Phoebe Waller-Bridge fans - now legion - can only dream of in 2019."

• "In 2016 it was turned into a wildly successful and 'utterly riveting'" TV series — The Guardian, as quoted on Goodreads [Source]

The published edition of the play notes it "In 2016 it was turned into a wildly successful and 'utterly riveting' (Guardian) BBC television series."

Here are a few resources that go deeper on this specific piece of work — the original one-woman Fleabag stage play and its relationship to the TV series:

1. "Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag(s): direct address and narrative control from stage to small screen" (Journal of International Women's Studies, Bridgewater State University) — this academic essay explores how the TV series owes its mode of direct address to the original one-woman stage monologue, applying auteur theory to the show's use of direct address and its relationship to feminist content. Worth a read for listeners who want a scholarly deep-dive into why the fourth-wall-breaking device works the way it does across both formats.
2. "This Scene in Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Original Play Never Made it Into 'Fleabag' (Thankfully)" (Collider) — this essay focuses specifically on the guinea pig's death as "the darkest omission from the one-woman show" and argues that Fleabag's escalating bad acts, including killing a guinea pig, mean she doesn't really earn a traditional happy ending, making it a good companion read to the episode's own extended discussion of that scene.
3. "Fleabag: How The Original Stage Play Is Different To The TV Show (Is It Better?)" (Screen Rant) — this piece walks through the character-by-character differences between play and show, including a detailed look at the Joe character, whom Waller-Bridge describes as "a proper cockney geezer" with a "joy that slaps you in the face," an elderly, loyal cafe customer absent from the TV series, making it a solid companion piece for listeners curious about exactly which elements got cut or redistributed.

There will Consider starting from the beginning — Episode 01: The Princess Bride is where we became friends.

Our argument is that Freaky Friday has "so much plot, no story" — and that its real, unplanned achievement isn't the mother-daughter reckoning it announces but the sibling truce it never bothers to take credit for.

On The Arc, three hosts finally watch the original 1976 Freaky Friday — the Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster body-swap comedy that started it all — to complete a franchise arc they'd accidentally done backwards. They dig into Jodie Foster filming this the same year as Taxi Driver, Barbara Harris's Second City roots, and why the film has "so much plot, no story." If you've ever wondered whether a candy-colored Disney comedy from 1976 has anything to say about feminism, nostalgia, or driving with your eyes closed, this is the episode.

Streaming availability as of 2026-07-04.

1. Where to watch Freaky Friday (1976):

- Disney+ (streaming with subscription) — https://www.disneyplus.com/browse/entity-d2969b02-9276-4625-b718-1406382986b3

- Amazon Prime Video (rent or buy) — https://www.primevideo.com/detail/Freaky-Friday-1976/0OFN8X2HDOCSCFOU9UJRQ3XKFG

- Apple TV (rent or buy)

- Fandango at Home (rent or buy)

Confirmed via "Watch Freaky Friday with a subscription on Disney+, rent on Fandango at Home, or buy on Fandango at Home" and "Currently you are able to watch 'Freaky Friday' streaming on Disney Plus... It is also possible to buy 'Freaky Friday' on Amazon Video, Apple TV Store, Fandango At Home as download or rent it on Amazon Video, Apple TV Store, Fandango At Home online."

No surprises here — the original tucks in neatly on Disney+ right alongside its own sequels, which is honestly the least chaotic thing about this franchise's release history.

New episodes of The Arc arrive roughly once a week, but they are ephemeral beings that sometimes take longer — you're encouraged to start from the beginning because you do not have to have seen the film we're talking about to enjoy the episode — heck, sometimes some of us haven't even watched the film we're talking about.

Spotify (link needed)

Pocket Casts (link needed)

RSS

Start from Episode 01: The Princess Bride

Freaky Friday (1976) is the Disney body-swap comedy where a mother and daughter — Barbara Harris and a very young Jodie Foster — wish, at the exact same moment, that they could switch places, and then do. It's the original: the movie that came before the Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis remake most people picture, before the musical, before Freakier Friday, based on a 1976 novel and, if you go looking, part of a much longer body-swap lineage that reaches back to a 1931 novel and an 1882 one before that. It's also the reason Jodie Foster wasn't Princess Leia — she was under contract to Disney to finish this and Candleshoe the same year she filmed Taxi Driver, which is either a delightful fun fact or the single most jarring double bill in her career, depending on how you feel about watching her play a luminous teenager and then refusing to believe it's the same actress.

We came to it out of order, on purpose — we'd already done the remakes and worked our way backward — and Jaclynn walked in ready to study it like an intellectual, hunting for depth of meaning and Freytag's Pyramid, before the movie gently informed her it was cotton candy that had told her exactly what it was up front. So this is the episode where we argue about whether a series of hijinks with no real arc counts as a story (Cole's verdict: one straight line, so much plot and no story), where Robby fell for the body doubles so completely he'll go to his grave insisting Barbara Harris did her own skateboarding, and where the whole thing detours — as these things do — through 1970s emergent feminism, a genuinely sharp "male chauvinist pig" monologue, the disquieting amount of the word "daddy," and a full accounting of why none of us will let Cole drive.

If you've never seen the film, none of that requires you to. If you have, we'd bet you've never watched it argued over by three improvisers who treat a Disney comedy with the same seriousness they'd bring to Lynch, land on the one genuinely tender thing it's actually doing — that the mother and daughter learn less about each other than about themselves — and then immediately ruin the moment. Jaclynn ironically loves it. Dad found the whole thing dumb and was, against his will, charmed anyway.

• Gary Nelson — Director — also: Freaky Friday (1976), The Black Hole (1979), Washington: Behind Closed Doors (1977)
• Mary Rodgers — Screenwriter — also: Freaky Friday (1976)
• Ron Miller — Producer — also: Freaky Friday (1976), The Black Hole (1979), Pete's Dragon (1977)
• Tom Leetch — Producer — also: Freaky Friday (1976), The Watcher in the Woods (1980), Snowball Express (1972)
• Charles F. Wheeler — Cinematographer — also: Freaky Friday (1976)
• Johnny Mandel — Composer — also: Freaky Friday (1976)

• Jodie Foster and Patsy Kelly info needed.Barbara Harris — Ellen Andrews — also: Nashville (1975), Family Plot (1976), A Thousand Clowns (1965)
• Jodie Foster — Annabel Andrews — also: Taxi Driver (1976), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Contact (1997)
• John Astin — Mr. Andrews — also: The Addams Family (1964), West Side Story (1961), The Frighteners (1996)
• Patsy Kelly — Mrs. Schmauss — also: Rosemary's Baby (1968), Pigskin Parade (1936), The North Avenue Irregulars (1979)
• Dick Van Patten — Mr. Joffert — also: Eight Is Enough (1977)

### Golden Globe Awards (34th Golden Globe Awards, 1977)

- Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy (Jodie Foster) — NOMINATION

- Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy (Barbara Harris) — NOMINATION

- Best Original Song ("I'd Like to Be You for a Day") — NOMINATION

At the 34th Golden Globe Awards, it received three nominations: Best Actress – Comedy or Musical (for both Foster and Harris), and Best Original Song ("I'd Like to Be You for a Day").

### Academy Awards

The film received no nominations, though both Foster & Harris (and the Original Song "I'd Like to Be You for a Day") were nominated for Golden Globes, so it was relatively close to inclusion.

### Other Major Ceremonies (BAFTA, Writers Guild, Directors Guild, National Film Registry, major festivals)

No wins or nominations from these bodies turned up in the search results for this film.

Summary: Freaky Friday (1976)'s formal competitive awards recognition is limited essentially to its three Golden Globe nominations (two for Best Actress – Musical/Comedy, one for Best Original Song), with no wins and no Oscar or other major-ceremony recognition.

The 1976 Freaky Friday film is based on Mary Rodgers' 1972 novel of the same name, with the screenplay also written by Rodgers herself, telling the story of 13-year-old Annabel Andrews and her mother, Ellen, who switch bodies for a single day following an argument, leading to a series of comedic mishaps as each navigates the other's responsibilities.

Source novel: Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers – Wikipedia

Bookshop.org search: https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=Freaky%20Friday

1. Jodie Foster was almost Princess Leia — but her Disney contract blocked it. Jodie Foster was offered the Princess Leia role in Star Wars: Episode IV around the time this movie was in development, when George Lucas wanted to make the character younger, but it was realized that Foster was still under contract to Disney. There may have been a way for Foster to get out of the contract, but her mother decided to honor it, so Foster completed the film as planned. [Source]
2. Neither lead actress actually water-skied — the film's signature stunt was smoke and mirrors. Neither Barbara Harris nor Jodie Foster did any actual water skiing in the film; in both cases, these scenes were achieved with the use of professional water skiers in long shot on location, and cutaway shots of the actresses in front of a rear projection effect. However, Foster did play field hockey in the film herself. [Source])
3. Foster shot this and Taxi Driver in the same year — a fact Disney's publicity conveniently ignored. She made Freaky Friday the same year that she made Taxi Driver, which the PR people at Buena Vista presumably did not mention. [Source]
4. Debra Winger auditioned for the lead role that went to Foster. Debra Winger auditioned for the role of Annabel Andrews, which ultimately went to Jodie Foster. [Source])
5. The film's police-car chase used genuine practical effects, not just camera tricks. The chases employed the skills of the Disney special effects people and are amazing: police cars are sliced in half, drive on two wheels, and change shapes as they race across footbridges and into the Los Angeles sewer system. [Source]

Here's what turned up on their subsequent work:

Gary Nelson went on to direct Disney's "The Black Hole," a rousing sci-fi adventure, following Freaky Friday. He largely stayed in television afterward — directing many television movies, including Murder in Coweta County starring Johnny Cash and Andy Griffith — and in the '80s returned to television almost exclusively, working on law-enforcement shows such as "Lady Blue," "Boys in Blue," and "Revolver." Nelson passed away in 2022.

Mary Rodgers continued expanding the Freaky Friday universe with two book sequels — A Billion for Boris (1974), where Annabel and her friend discover a TV that tunes into future broadcasts, and Summer Switch (1982), where Annabel's brother and father swap bodies. She also wrote the Broadway hit Once Upon a Mattress, which made Carol Burnett a star, and later saw a 1996 revival starring Sarah Jessica Parker. Decades later, her original story kept generating new adaptations, including a 2003 cinema remake with a screenplay by Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon, followed by a 2025 sequel from Elyse Hollander and Jordan Weiss, both based on Rodgers' book.

---

FAMOUS QUOTES

Based on documented critic reviews found in my search, here are confirmable quotes from named critics discussing the 1976 Freaky Friday:

• "The problems resulting from the switch of identities are fairly predictable, but fun: This is one of the better recent Disney productions." — Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com [Source]
• "Now Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster think to themselves in each other's voices and talk in their own, which is better than being either Dean Jones or a dog, but not much." — Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com [Source]
• "Barbara Harris has always played a sort of absent-minded little girl lost. Jodie Foster, in films like 'Bugsy Malone' and 'Taxi Driver', has shown the level-headed maturity of a much older person. And so, when we see Harris as her daughter and Foster as her mother, we believe it, because in some undefinable way having nothing to do with chronological age, Jodie Foster IS older than Barbara Harris." — Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com [Source]
• "Toward the end there are some amusing car-chase scenes. Elsewhere the humor is clotted by the feeling that the jokes are chasing the reactions, instead of the other way around." — Richard Eder, The New York Times (via Wikipedia summary, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freaky_Friday_(1976_film))
• "do a serviceable job with mediocre material" — Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune [Source])
• "has the stuff of a stronger, more sophisticated film but has been processed to fit into the bland, synthetic Disney formula. Even so, both Miss Harris and Miss Foster make the most of their offbeat opportunity." — Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times [Source])
• "suffers from sluggish exposition, mediocre direction and a one-closeup-after-another method of composition advertising the film's eventual retirement to the Disney TV series, but it probably salvages things with juvenile audiences by finishing fast." — Gary Arnold, The Washington Post [Source])

Here are a few resources for listeners who want to dig deeper into Freaky Friday (1976):

1. "Freaky Friday" – Book vs. Movie podcast (Frolic Podcast Network) — This episode pits Mary Rodgers' original novel against both the 1976 and 2003 film adaptations, and discusses the interesting life of author Mary Rogers, the casual racism in the story and how it differs from the various adaptations, and which version the hosts like best. It's a great companion listen since it dives into the source novel your hosts admitted they hadn't read.
2. The Swapcast Podcast, Episode 5: "Freaky Friday (1976)" — A podcast entirely dedicated to body-swap movies, this episode covers the original film with a similarly irreverent tone, as the hosts check out the psychedelic switch in Disney's 1976 film, talking water skiing, gender politics, and worshipping at Jodie Foster's and Barbara Harris's feet — a fun match for listeners who enjoyed the "cotton candy" framing of your episode.
3. TCM's article on Freaky Friday (1976) — This piece from Turner Classic Movies is worth a read for background context, including details on how Foster's loyalty to her Disney contract prevented her from accepting the role of Princess Leia in Star Wars, with George Lucas deciding to make Leia older once it was confirmed Foster wouldn't be cast, plus Barbara Harris's background as a founding member of The Second City improv troupe — both topics your hosts got excited about.

New to The Arc? Start with Episode 02: The Fantastic Four if you like Marvel movies — and want to hate us forever and tell your friends how lame we are.

Sound design via Freesound.org and Envato.

Our most salient point this episode revolves around the exploration of the original 1976 film "Freaky Friday," a cinematic artifact that invites reflection on both familial relationships and the comedic intricacies of body-swapping narratives. We delve into the juxtaposition of the original and its remakes, particularly noting how the character dynamics manifest differently across versions. Our discussion reveals that while the film presents a series of humorous vignettes, it simultaneously offers poignant insights into self-discovery and personal growth, particularly for the characters of Annabelle and her mother. We engage with the film's cultural significance within the Disney canon, acknowledging its nostalgic value while critiquing its narrative structure and character development. Ultimately, this episode serves as a contemplative examination of how such stories resonate with audiences, both in their time and in contemporary discourse.

The dialogue surrounding the original 'Freaky Friday' serves as a springboard for a deeper inquiry into the intersections of nostalgia, gender, and identity within the realm of cinematic storytelling. The speakers articulate their varied reactions to the film, juxtaposing their childhood memories with contemporary critiques. They reflect on the film's comedic elements, particularly its reliance on physical humor and the charm of its lead actresses, while also grappling with its dated portrayals of gender dynamics. The speakers engage in a rich analysis of the film's narrative deficiencies, noting the lack of emotional depth in the mother-daughter relationship compared to sibling dynamics. This reflective conversation ultimately reveals the film's dual nature as both a source of entertainment and a cultural touchstone, prompting discussions about the complexities of familial love and the societal expectations placed upon women across generations. Their insights reveal a profound appreciation for the film's impact while acknowledging its limitations within a modern context.

Takeaways:

• The podcast elaborates on the historical significance of the 1976 film 'Freaky Friday', highlighting its impact on the genre of body-swap comedies.
• Insights into the evolution of storytelling techniques are discussed, with references to Freytag's pyramid and how 'Freaky Friday' deviates from traditional narrative structures.
• The speakers reflect on their personal experiences and nostalgic connections to the film, emphasizing its cultural relevance during its release period.
• A detailed examination of the performances by Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster showcases their comedic talents and physicality in the film's humorous scenarios.
• The discussion includes critiques of the film's narrative coherence, suggesting that it lacks a substantial character arc or significant emotional depth.
• The episode concludes with a commentary on the representation of gender roles in the film, contrasting it with contemporary portrayals in similar productions.